Haskell Weekly News

Welcome to issue 143 of HWN, a newsletter covering developments in the Haskell community.

Editor's Note: The email version of this week's HWN went out with the wrong issue number, it has been edited in this version.

First of all, apologies for the late edition, I've only one set of finals
left, and then everything should return to a normal schedule (at least,
that's the plan). This week brings lots of development on the various usb
utilities, an edition of the Haskell Web News (which covers, in summary, the
events of the previous month in the Haskell online community), and some really
great discussion about why Haskell is Pure. Until next week, Haskeller's,
your Haskell Weekly News!

Announcements

Next meeting:
December 17th at MIT (32-G882). Ravi Nanavati
announced
the next meeting of the Boston Area Haskell User Group. Ryan Newton will
be talking about Intel Concurrent Collections for Haskell.

PCLT-0.1 and PCLT-DB-0.1. Andrey Sisoyev
announced
his first two packages he's developed in Haskell. Both of his new packages
relate to localization of packages.

Announcing a summer internship for a NASA-sponsored project. Lee
Pike
announced
a new summer internship sponsored by NASA and Galois, Inc.

unicode-symbols-0.1.1. Roel van Dijk
announced
the release of his package 'unicode-symbols'. This packages offers
alternative symbols for a number of common function and operators from
the base and container packages.

ls-usb-0.1.0.2. Roel van Dijk
announced
a minor update of ls-usb, his package for listing USB devices connected
to your system.

usb-safe-0.1. Bas van Dijk
announced
the release of his package usb-safe, which provides an abstract interface
to the bindings-libusb library.

usb-0.3. Bas van Dijk
announced
a new release of his 'usb' library for high-level communication with usb
devices from Haskell.

bindings-libusb-1.4.2. Bas van Dijk
announced
a new version of bindings-libusb, a DSL based, low level binding to
libusb

The Haskell Web News: December 2009 Edition. Don Stewart
announced
the Haskell Web News for December.

new installment of failure framework. Michael Snoyman
announced
the next installment of the Failure Framework.

PortAudio Windows Tutorial and Binaries. M Xyz
announced
a tutorial for setting up PortAudio on Windows

readline-statevar-1.0.1.0. Krzysztof Skrzetnicki
announced
a small wrapper for readline.

hakyll-0.1. Jasper van der Jeugt
announced
Hakyll, a simple static site generator written in Haskell.

Welcome to issue 142 of HWN, a newsletter covering
developments in the Haskell community.

Occasionally, I have something silly or clever to say here. Usually I
give a summary of the weeks news and end it with a bit of a cliche tagline,
however, this is finals week, and as such, there is absolutely no brain cells
left working to come up with any cleverness for here. I'll see you next week
with (hopefully) more ability for humor. Until next week, the Haskell Weekly
News!

Announcements

error-message. Gregory Crosswhite
announced
a package for handling errors in haskell. To quote his message directly,
'If there is one thing that we really don't have enough of in Haskell,
it is *ways to handle errors*!'

atom-0.1.3. Tom Hawkins
announced
a new version of the Atom DSL for designing hard realtime embedded
software.

Blueprint 0.1 -- PREVIEW. Gregory Crosswhite
announced
a preview version of his 'Blueprint' configuration package.

haskell-mode 2.7.0. Svein Ove Aas
announced
another release of Haskell-mode for Emacs

graphviz-2999.7.0.0. Ivan Lazar Miljenovic
announced
a new version of his set of bindings to the graphviz tools for visualizing
graphs.

SaC Tutorial at PPoPP 2010. Clemens Grelck
announced
a tutorial to be held at PPoPP on SAC and it's auto-parallelizing compiler
SAC2C.

Call for papers: PAPP 2010, 7th International Workshop on Practical
Aspects of High-level Parallel Programming. Clemens Grelck
announced
a call for papers for the Seventh International Workshop on Practical
Aspects of High-level Parallel Programming.

PhD Studentships in Nottingham. Graham Hutton
announced
some PhD openings at the University of Nottingham.

Second Call for Copy: Monad.Reader Issue 15. Brent Yorgey
announced
a second call for copy for the Monad.Reader.

3 full professor positions at DIKU. Fritz Henglein
announced
three open professor positions at the the Department of Computer Science
at the University of Copenhagen (DIKU).

Hubris 0.0.2, the Ruby-Haskell bridge. Mark Wotton
announced
a new version of the Hubris package is now available on hackage.

Discussion

You are in a twisty maze of concurrency libraries,
all different ... Patrick Caldon
asked
about the 'right' concurrency package to use for his project.

Greetings! 2D Graphics? M Xyz
asked
(enthusiatically) about different ways to do 2-dimensional graphics
in Haskell.

Wikipedia article. Simon Marlow
rallied
us all into fixing the (or at least starting to fix) wikipedia page
for Haskell.

Great Programs to Read? Michael Lesniak
asked
about what programs were worth reading.

Blog noise

Haskell news from
the blogosphere.
Blog posts from people new to the Haskell community are marked
with >>>, be sure to welcome them!

Quotes of the Week

Dave_Benjamin: please talk to your son or daughter about
parametric polymorphism

Cale: Beginners are confusing to
beginners. I move that we remove them from the language altogether.

monochrom: I am 17-ary, going on 18-ary, I can take curry of
you

jmillikin: [the real world is] an implementation
detail of IO, pay it no mind

monochrom,ezyang:
The Principle Of Idiot Savant: any sufficiently misguided opinion is
indistinguishable from deep insight

Cale: I swear
that most of higher-dimensional category theory must have been arrived
at by some guys sitting around in a room with a blackboard and saying
"What if a drew a diagram like *THIS*!?" and drawing some insane scribble
up on the blackboard, and then everyone tries to figure out how to turn
it into meaningful mathematics.

jbe: Here I am, happy
my code compiles, and the runtime is thumbing its nose at Turing.

Ferdirand: I was TA for a C++ programming course aimed at
1st year physics once. Some girl asked for help "i wrote pseudo-code
but I cannot translate it to C++". Her pseudo-code was valid haskell. I
cried.

mmorrow: [regarding excessive use of categorical
recursion schemes] a morphasm?

copumpkin: I'm on
a rollomorphism

dons: but rumours are remarkably
common when it comes to haskell

monochrom: If you
read a haskell book or an FP book, by chapter 5 it's already doing data
structures. It's chapter 10 in imperative books.

Welcome to issue 141 of HWN, a newsletter covering
developments in the Haskell community.

Firstly, sorry for the late HWN, a turkey coma is equal parts gift and
curse. This week, we have some very exciting news, a new Haskell standard
-- Haskell 2010 -- was announced, including several small changes. Also, we
have lots of new packages, a possible Boston-area Hackathon coming up soon,
and some great discussion. I won't hold you back from skipping all that and
just reading the funny quotes! Haskellers, your (belated) Haskell Weekly
News!

Announcements

Haskell 2010. Simon Marlow
announced
the new revision of Haskell, Haskell 2010. Part of the new, less
monolithic Haskell Prime process, Haskell 2010 includes several changes
to the Haskell Language, including support for nonstandard if-then-else
syntax (particularly wrt `do` notation and indentation), pattern guards,
and several other changes. See the post for details.

Clutterhs 0.1. Matt Arsenault
announced
Clutterhs, version 0.1. A set of bindings for Clutter, a GObject based
library for creating 2.5D interfaces using OpenGL.

Interesting experiences of test automation in Haskell? Automation of
Software Test 2010. John Hughes
announced
a 'heads up' for the Automation af Software Test 2010 workshop

NoSlow - Microbenchmarks for array libraries. Roman Leshchinskiy
announced
his benchmark suite for various array and list libraries.

CMCS 2010: First call for papers. Alexandra Silva
announced
a first call for papers for the Tenth International Workshop on Coalgebraic
Methods in Computer Science, taking place 26-28 March 2010, in Paphos,
Cyprus.

GPCE'10 First Call for Papers. Bruno Oliveira
announced
a first call for papers for the Ninth International Conference on
Generative Programming and Component Engineering. GPCE 2010 October 10-13,
in Eindhoven, The Netherlands.

Call for Participation: TLDI'10. Andrew Kennedy
announced
a call for participation in the 2010 ACM SIGPLAN Workshop on Types in
Language Design and Implementation

Deadline Extension: JSC Special Issue on Automated Specification and
Verification of Web Systems. demis
announced
an extension to the paper deadline for the JSC Special Issue on Automated
Specification and Verification of Web Systems.

VSTTE 2010: Verified Software -- Second Call for Papers. Gudmund
Grov
announced
the second call for papers for the Third International Conference on
Verified Software: Theories, Tools, and Experiments

GPipe-1.1.0 with greatly improved performance. Tobias Bexelius
announced
a new version of the GPipe package, now with greatly improved
performance.

wumpus-core. Stephen T
announced
a new version of the wumpus-core package, a library for drawing 2D vector
pictures, supporting output to SVG and postscript.

package-vt-0.1.3.3, Haskell Package Versioning Tool. Krzysztof
Skrzetnicki
announced
the first release of his automatic version tracking tool, package-vt.

Elerea 1.1. Patai Gergely
announced
a new version of Elerea, a simple pull-based FRP library. Elerea (and
FRP in general) allow for stream oriented programming, typically done in
a applicative style.

mecha-0.0.4. Tom Hawkins
announced
a new version of Mecha, a little constructive solid modeling language
intended for doing 3D CAD.

atom-0.1.2. Tom Hawkins
announced
a new release of Atom, a DSL for designing hard realtime embedded
software with Haskell. This release adds guarded division operations,
a new scheduling constraint, and a new rule scheduling algorithm.

Managing Cabal Dependencies using Nix and Hack-nix. Marc Weber
announced
a package for dealing with Cabal dependencies on the Nix OS platform.

Discussion

haskell in online contests. vishnu
asked
about using Haskell in online contests, and particularly dealing with
the SPOJ tool for judging programs.

Namespaces for values, types, and classes. Sebastian Fischer
suggested
allowing a namespace separation between class-names and other language
elements.

I miss OO. Michael Mossey
lamented
his desire for Object-oriented features in Haskell, this led to a
interesting discussion about name punning and typeclasses.

Haskell Hackathon in Boston January 29th-31st? Ravi Nanavati
proposed
a potential Hackathon in this editor's favorite city, to be held the 29th
to the 31st.

Blog noise

Haskell news from
the blogosphere.
Blog posts from people new to the Haskell community are marked
with >>>, be sure to welcome them!

Welcome to issue 140 of HWN, a newsletter covering
developments in the Haskell community.

Apologies for the somewhat late edition, I got back late from the NES/MAA
conference yesterday in Springfield, MA, and was generally too exhausted
from all the math competing and giving of talks that HWN could not compete
with the appeal of sleeping... This week there was a new edition of the
HCAR, plenty of good discussion about Iteratee's and the Type Directed Name
Resolution proposal, altogether a busy week. So here it is, your Haskell
Weekly News!

Announcements

[BostonHaskell] Next meeting:
November 24th at MIT (32-G882). Ravi Nanavati
announced
the next meeting of BAHUG.

Haskell Communities and Activities Report (17th ed., November
2009). Janis Voigtlaender
announced
the new edition of the Haskell Communities and Activities Report.

Call for Participation - PEPM'10 (co-located with POPL'10). Janis
Voigtlaender
announced
a call for participation for PEPM 2010.

LambdaCube engine and Bullet physics binding. Csaba Hruska
announced
a binding to the LambdaCube and Bullet engines.

ICFP '10: Second call for workshop proposals. Wouter Swierstra
announced
a second call for workshop proposals for ICFP 2010.

wcwidth-0.0.1. Jason Dusek
announced
a small package which provides binding to wchar.h, which assigns a column
width to unicode characters.

gnome-keyring 0.1 (bindings to libgnome-keyring). John Millikin
announced
a set of bindings to the GNOME keyring libraries.

attempt. Michael Snoyman
announced
a new release of the `attempt` package.

control-monad-failure and safe-failure. Michael Snoyman
also
announced a new version of `control-monad-failure` and
`safe-failure`.

Announcing the GHC Bug Sweep. Simon Marlow
announced
the GHC bug sweep, to help weed out the GHC Trac of old bugs, and also to
get warm fuzzy feelings from helping everyone's favorite compiler devs.

New Industrial Haskell Group membership options. Duncan Coutts
announced
some new membership options for the the Industrial Haskell Group (IHG)

bindings-SDL 1.0.2, the domain specific language for FFI
description. Mauricio Antunes
announced
a new version of the bindings-SDL package.

wxHaskell 0.12.1.2. Jeremy O'Donoghue
announced
a release of the wxHaskell package, including new improved support
for installation via cabal on any system, with only a minor caveat on
Windows.

TFP 2010 - Call for Papers. TFP 2010
announced
a call for papers for TFP 2010, the 11th symposium on Trends in Functional
Programming.

Reminder: Fun in the afternoon, MSR Cambridge, 26 Nov. Simon Marlow
announced
a final reminder for the `Fun in the Afternoon` meeting, which will
be at MSR Cambridge on the 26th of November (ED: Thanksgiving for us
Americans, if only there were some way to combine turkey-oriented gluttony
with Functional programming...).

Job at the University of Technology in Cottbus. Wolfgang Jeltsch
announced
a job opening at the University of Technology in Cottbus.

Scottish Category Theory Seminar. Conor McBride
announced
the first meeting of Scottish Category Theory Seminar, a forum
for discussion of all aspects of Category Theory, be they pure or
applied. (ED: I am fighting very hard to not make some sort of
Braveheart Joke...)

Discussion

Haskell as an alternative to Java. Philippos Apolinarius
wondered
whether Haskell would make for a good Java alternative.

Status of TypeDirectedNameResolution proposal? Levi Greenspan
asked
about the status of the TDNR proposal.

Typef*ck: Brainf*ck in the type system. Johnny Morrice
showed
us his implementation of everyone's favorite profane programming
language... in the type system.

Could someone teach me why we use Data.Monoid? Magicloud Magiclouds
requested
some insight to why we use monoids so much in Haskell, leading to a
fantastic discussion of all the myriad places Monoids pop up in both
Haskell and in Math in general.

Blog noise

Haskell news from
the blogosphere.
Blog posts from people new to the Haskell community are marked
with >>>, be sure to welcome them!

Welcome to issue 139 of HWN, a newsletter covering
developments in the Haskell community.

Lots of good discussion this week about everything from Monoids to Memory
Leaks, Parsers (for Token Streams) and pushing Haskell onto Medical devices! I
could go on some long rant rife with really righteous alliteration or a touch
of timely consonance, but instead I'll leave you all, my fellow Haskellers,
to read your Haskell Weekly News!

Announcements

Two Open
PhD positions at the Technical University Munich. Axel Simon
announced
two PhD positions are open in Low-level and High-level analysis, see the
post for details. (ED: Apologies for being so late in this announcment,
it slipped under my radar! )

Final CFP: WFLP 2010. Deadlines extended: Abstract due Nov 18; Full
paper due Nov 25 (LNCS). Pablo Nogueira
announced
a deadline extension for the WLFP 2010 conference, abstracts are now due
November 18, and full papers by the 25th.

dbus-core 0.6 and dbus-client 0.2. John Millikin
announced
the second release of his dbus libraries. Changes include performance
improvments, better support for byte arrays, and TCP/IP transport (though
this remains untested).

simple-observer-0.0.1, a simple implementation of the observer design
pattern. Andy Gimblett
announced
an implementation of the Observer pattern in Haskell

ICFP 2010: Call for papers. Wouter Swierstra
announced
a call for papers for ICFP 2010.

Calling all Haskellers in Huntsville, Alabama, or surrounding
areas! Jake McArthur
announced
the formation of a new Haskell User Group in Alabama. (ED: Apparently,
Shae is the Johnny Appleseed for the Haskell Community, #haskell, BAHUG,
now AHUG... when will it end? )

acme-dont. Gracjan Polak
announced
the acme-dont package, providing a vital missed feature to our language --
a don't monad. See the post for all the revolutionary details.

Welcome to issue 137 of HWN, a newsletter covering
developments in the Haskell community.

This week brings a new release of xmonad, some cool bindings to
allow interaction with GNOME, KDE, and XFCE desktops and a new version of
haskell-mode for the lesser of two editors... Some progress has also been made
on the new HWN software, though this was mitigated by the fact that I started
playing with the Isabelle theorem prover (after reading about Haskabelle) and
so now I find myself convinced I should formally prove all of my software,
and also that I'm pretty much incapable of getting things done when cool
tools present themselves. In fact, I don't think I'll even be able to finish
this editori*Exception:
The Haskell Weekly News!

Announcements

xmonad 0.9 is
now available! Don Stewart
announced
a new version of everyone's favorite Tiling Window Manager, xmonad! The
changes and improvments are too numerous to mention, see the post for
details!

WFLP2010 2nd CFP: LNCS + invited speaker + abstract due Nov
9. Pablo Nogueira
announced
a second call for papers for the Workshop on Functional and Constraint
Logic Programming.

dbus-core 0.5 and dbus-client 0.1. John Millikin
announced
pure-Haskell client libraries for using the D-Bus protocol. D-Bus is
heavily used for inter-application IPC on Free and open-source desktop
platforms, such as Linux, OpenSolaris, and FreeBSD. These libraries allow
applications written in Haskell to inter-operate with other components
of recent GNOME, KDE, and XFCE desktops.

Singapore Functional Programmer Group First Meetup. Kenny Lu
announced
(with apologies for the late notice) an informal meeting for the Functional
Programmer Group in Singapore on 2 Nov 2009. The theme for the first
meeting will be 'meet and greet'.

GeBoP 1.7. Henk-Jan van Tuyl
updated
and cabalized GeBoP (the General Boardgames Player) and uploaded it
to hackage.

GPS package on Hackage. Thomas DuBuisson
announced
that he fixed up the GPS package to add correct distance calculation and
a separate module for exporting KML.

GPipe-TextureLoad 1.0.0 and GPipe 1.0.3. Tobias Bexelius
announced
a new version of GPipe as well as a utility package for loading
textures.

HoleyMonoid-0.1. Martijn van Steenbergen
announced
announce the first release of HoleyMonoid, a datatype that helps you
build monoids with holes in them. The holes are filled in later using
normal function application.

GlomeVec, IcoGrid. Jim Snow
announced
a couple of packages, GlomeVec is a vector library used in Jim's ray-tracer,
and IcoGrid is a library for dealing with grids of hexagons and pentagons
wrapped on a sphere.

2nd CFP: JSC Special Issue on Automated Verification and Specification
of Web Systems. demis
announced
a special issue of the Journal of Symbolic Computation. The issue
contains articles relating to Automated Specification and Verification
of Web Systems.

Quotes of the Week

Veinor: I program in austere
haskell. I name all my variables a, a', a'', a''', etc

ddarius: releases network version 127.0.0.1

Berengal: 'Bobby Boolean felt horrible. What did he ever
do to the other values? He was just a simple bit, a simple answer
to a simple question! Suddenly he felt his insides churn; he felt an
exception coming on! Oh no! What should he do, now that he was outside
of IO?'

Berengal: '"Go away! You're not like us!" the
other values yelled. "You're impure! Impure! Impure! Impure!" they
started chanting.'

dpratt71: <dpratt71>
so I read somewhere that the unofficial motto of Haskell was
"avoid success at all costs"... <Baughn> dpratt71: Yeah. We
failed.

Warrigal: Note to self: don't do maximum
[1..].

mauke: the first and foremost task of a
haskell compiler is to break haskell programs

ksf:
...premature generalisation is the root of all procrastination.

jimi_hendrix: that took longer than it should have, but
it feels so pure

ddarius: Unfortunately, the logic
programming community has this unhealthy death grip on Prolog.

Welcome to issue 136 of HWN, a newsletter covering
developments in the Haskell community.

Over the last week, fpisfun from reddit announced a new subreddit
for simple, direct applications of Haskell to common problems
which normally might be solved by a perl script or bit of
bash. There are a number of examples already there, and the numbers
keep growing. It's not just command-line utilities either, there is also this
post on calculating the bend needed for a bay window curtainrod. There
is plenty of great material if you're new to Haskell and looking for some
basic examples of different simple projects, examples of using monads and
functors appropriately, or just want to see some 'real' programs in Haskell,
it's worth a look!

Also, a small correction, due to some issues with
the tools, unicode characters get replaced with their ASCII 'equivalents'
so that an 'e' with an umlaut becomes an 'e' character. Thanks to Wolfram
Kahl for pointing out that this change is not as innocent as I thought,
apologies thusly to Guenther Schmidt (I'm told thats a better approximation
of the correct spelling) for the error, I apologize in advance for any
other similar errors. I'm working on improving the unicode support in the
tools, but it's a nasty bug to catch.

This was a long editorial, so I
won't take any more of your time, Haskellers, the Haskell Weekly News!

Announcements

Call for Contributions - Haskell Communities
and Activities Report, November 2009 edition. voigt
called
for contributions to the November 2009 issue of the Haskell Communities
and Activities Report. See post for details.

Call for Participation: VSTTE 2009. Jean-Christophe Filliatre
announced
a call for participation for the VSTTE Workshop.

WFLP 2010 Call for papers. Pablo Nogueira
announced
a call for papers for the 2010 WFLP.

BAHUG Next meeting: October 21st at MIT (32G-882). Ravi Nanavati
announced
the next meeting of the Boston Area Haskell User's Group. Which will be
in the CSAIL Reading Room at MIT. This editor hopes to actually make it
to this one, so maybe I'll see you there!

fp-southwales, the South Wales Functional Programming User
Group. Andy Gimblett
announced
the formation of fp-southwales, a user group for anybody interested in
functional programming in the area of south Wales, UK.

The Monad.Reader (14) - Call for copy. Brent Yorgey
announced
the call for copy for the next issue of `The Monad.Reader`, Issue #14

Extensions to Vec uploaded (useful for GPipe programs). Tobias
Bexelius
announced
two extensions to the Vec package: Vec-Transform and
Vec-Boolean. Vec-Transform provides some 4x4 transform matrices such as
perspective projection and rotation. Vec-Boolean provides Data.Boolan
instances for the Vec data types.

Bindings to FFMpeg library. Vasyl Pasternak
announced
the next release of the hs-ffmpeg library. Downloadable from Hackage
along with the ffmpeg-tutorials, which show capabilities of this
library. The installation process is a bit tricky so Vasyl put up a blog
post which describes the installation process.

Haskell Hackathon in Zurich, Switzerland. Johan Tibell
announced
a Hackathon in Zurich, to be held in March in the Google office. No concrete
date has been decided, but if your interested, make sure to add your name here.

Reverse Dependencies in Hackage (demo). Roel van Dijk
announced
his patch to add reverse-dependencies to Hackage, see the linked post
for information on where to see an example version of hackage.

Discussion

Relational Algebra. Guenther Schmidt
asked
about whether or not a EDSL for relational algebra in Haskell.

GHC devs. Andrew Coppin
asked
about how many GHC Developers there are, and was somewhat surprised with
the answer.

Fuzzy Logic / Linguistic Variables. Neal Alexander
demonstrated
an implementation of fuzzy logic taken from the book: 'Programming Game AI
by Example' by Mat Buckland. In the book, the code was in C++, rewriting
it in Haskell made for much more succint, readable code.

Graph Library Using Associated Types. Lajos Nagy
asked
about using Associated types in a Graph library.

Is proof by testing possible? Muad'Dib
asked
us Haskell Mentat's about whether it was possible to prove a function
correct in a finite number of tests. The discussion brought forth not only
answers but some /very cool/ results about the application of compactness
(in the topological sense) to testing.

Blog noise

Haskell news from
the blogosphere.
Blog posts from people new to the Haskell community are marked
with >>>, be sure to welcome them!

Welcome to issue 135 of HWN, a newsletter covering
developments in the Haskell community.

What with Don Stewart's call to arms
to lead Haskell to conquest over (E)DSL-land, I've once again tried
to highlight discussion of EDSL's this week. Fortunately, it was
actually more difficult choosing what _not_ to include this week,
since there was so much discussion about DSLs and Syntax extensions
(a related notion, in my opinion). Also, this week Bryan O'Sullivan
put his Criterion Library to good use on the `text` package, leading to code
which is more than ten times faster than before! With all this fantastic news,
I won't hold you up any longer, Haskellers, the Haskell Weekly News!

Announcements

CfPart: FMICS 2009, 2-3 November 2009, Final
Call. FMICS 2009 workshop chair
announced
the final call for particpaction for FMICS 2009

ICFP videos now available. Wouter Swierstra
announced
the availablity of videos from the International Conference on Functional
Programming (ICFP)

GPipe-1.0.0: A functional graphics API for programmable
GPUs. Tobias Bexelius
announced
the first release of GPie, a functional graphics API for programmable
GPUs.

text 0.5, a major revision of the Unicode text library. Bryan
O'Sullivan
announced
a new, major version of the text package. New API features, and huge
improvments in speed, as Bryan says, 'Get it while it's fresh on Hackage,
folks!'

vty-ui 0.2. Jonathan Daugherty
announced
a new version of the vty-ui package, with fewer bugs, more widgets,
and cleaner code due to new more powerful abstractions.

htzaar-0.0.1. Tom Hawkins
announced
HTZAAR, a Haskell implementation of TZAAR

Graphalyze-0.8.0.0 and SourceGraph-0.5.5.0. Ivan Lazar Miljenovic
announced
To keep this editor happy, Ivan released two new packaged in one
announcement. This time, he's added Legend support to Graphalyze, but
also many new changes to SourceGraph, including a legend so you can see
what all the symbols mean, Better color support, and much more.

TxtSushi 0.4.0. Keith Sheppard
announced
a new version of TxtSushi, a set of command line utilities for processing
CSV and TSV files.

Discussion

Applicative do? Philippa Cowderoy
asked
about a `do` like syntax for Applicative functors.

How to add use custom preprocessor in cabal. Bernd Brassel
asked
how to add a custom preprocessor to the build chain of a cabal file.

On DSLs - one last time. Gunther Schmidt
summarized
his impressions on al the recent discussion of DSLs

What is a DSL? Oleg
offered
some insight into different properties
that can be part of a single tagless framework. He also
pointed to some slides and other materials such as a website
here and slides here about DSL
implementations and definitions.

What is a DSL? Gunther Schmidt
posed
the question, 'What is a DSL', and with some further questions added by
yours truly, a lively discussion about the definition of a DSL ensued.

Finally tagless - stuck with implementation of 'lam'. Gunther
Schmidt
asked
another question about Finally Tagless DSLs and resolving an issue with
the implementation of 'lam'

Blog noise

Haskell news from
the blogosphere.
Blog posts from people new to the Haskell community are
marked with >>>, be sure to welcome them!

>>> Nefigah: Fake
World Haskell. Nefigah, a recent addition to the
community, has been working through RWH, and is providing some
excellent examples. Though, This editor prefers the title 'Real
Life Haskell' as opposed to his choice.

Welcome to issue 134 of HWN, a newsletter covering
developments in the Haskell community.

I have a nasty sinus infection this week, so we're somewhat light on
content. Lots of good discussion about DSL related stuff this week. Bryan
O'Sullivan also release 'Criterion' this week, a new benchmarking library
that Don Stewart described (on reddit) as 'awesome and game changing.' A new
TMR editor -- someone familiar -- was announced. Also, there was some talk
about homework policies on the mailinglists and in the irc channels. There
is a page
on the Haskell wiki about this, but to sum it up in a maxim, remember, 'Help,
don't do'. Until next week, the Haskell Weekly News!

Announcements

New TMR editor. Wouter Swierstra
announced
that he would be stepping down from the editorship of 'The Monad Reader',
with former HWN editor Brent Yorgey taking his place. Much thanks for
Wouter's hard work and good luck to Brent on his new editor job!

SourceGraph 0.5.{0,1,2}.0. Ivan Lazar Miljenovic
announced
three new releases of the SourceGraph packages, this links to the latest
release.

json-b-0.0.4. Jason Dusek
announced
a new version of the json-b package, which fixes defective handling of
empty objects and arrays.

rss2irc 0.4 released. Simon Michael
announced
a new release of rss2irc, with many new improvements and features.

vty-ui 0.1. Jonathan Daugherty
announced
vty-ui, which is an extensible library of user interface widgets for
composing and laying out Vty user interfaces.

Graphalyze-0.7.0.0. Ivan Lazar Miljenovic
announced
(in an apparent effort to take over hackage by submitting dozens of
quality packages at absurdly high speed), Graphalyze, a library for using
graph-theoretic techniques to analyse the relationships inherent within
discrete data.

Criterion. Bryan O'Sullivan
announced
(without tacking on an 'ANN' tag, I might add, I almost
missed it!) Criterion, a benchmarking library he describes here.

ListTree 0.1. yairchu@gmail.com
announced
ListTree, a package for combinatorial search and pruning of trees.

usb-0.1. Bas van Dijk
announced
a library for interacting with usb modules from userspace.

(Deadline extended to October 5th) APLAS 2009 Call for
Posters. Kiminori Matsuzaki
announced
a deadline extension to the call for posters for the APLAS conference.

graphviz-2999.6.0.0. Ivan Lazar Miljenovic
announced
a new version of the graphviz library, which features various new features
and small changes.

Discussion

Testing polymorphic properties with
QuickCheck. Jean-Philippe Bernardy
gave
an excellent overview about how to use QuickCheck to test polymorphic
properties.

Designing a DSL? Gunther Schmidt
asked
about different methods employed for designing a DSL.

DSL and GUI Toolkits. Gunther Schmidt
also
asked about different DSLs for working with GUIs

error on "--++ bla bla bla". Hong Yang
asked
about why '--++' wasn't being parsed in the way he thought it was.

Haskell for Physicists. edgar
requested
name suggestions for the talk he is giving about Physics and Haskell.

Blog noise

Haskell news from
the blogosphere.
Blog posts from people new to the Haskell community are
marked with >>>, be sure to welcome them!

Quotes of the Week

dekudekuplex: (Unfortunately
(unless intentional)) the preceding (by ksf (in the 'Quotes of the Week'
section)) quote had mismatched (one too many opening) parentheses (although
it was still funny (even though it could have been edited (to make the
parentheses match (even though that is not an important issue)))).

pozic: I think if you want to contact dons, you have
to say that you found a bug in ByteString.